Dhiren Borisa is an activist, queer geographer, and poet and currently teach gender at Jindal Global Law School. They are also an honorary visiting fellow at University of Leicester. Their research is situated at the intersections of caste, class, queerness,and the production of urban spaces of survival.
Read More
Read MoreRethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity - one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. In The Location of Culture, he uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.
This guide has been produced by the Carrot Workers‘ Collective in London. It attempts to explore and debunk some commonly held myths around creative careers and provide some survival tools for those currently working in the creative sector. This guide asks: is unpaid interning essential for a job in the creative sector? Does interning and free labour automatically lead to paid work? Do those who work in the creative industry actually do creative work? Why do we often think that cultural work isn‘t ‘real work‘, and therefore that cultural workers don‘t deserve the same rights as everyone else? The contents of the guide are based on real life experiences of cultural workers in London who tell it like it really is, sharing the fears and desires that motivate their work, their experiences of disappointment and survival, and also, importantly, suggesting how we could organise our work otherwise.
Read More
Read MoreI learned to read and write inside worlds at war. I was born near the end ofWorld War II, grew up in the Cold War, attended graduate school during the Viet Nam War, and I am preparing this Reader for publication during my country's invasion oflraq. And that's the short list. These wars are personal. They make me who I am; they throw me into inherited obligations, whether I like it or not. These worlds at war are the belly of the monster from which I have tried to write into a more vivid reality a kin group of feminist figures. My hope is that these marked figures might guide us to a more livable place, one that in the spirit of science fiction I have called "elsewhere."
Unlike sight, which is the sense that dominates our epoch of touchscreens, computer-borne social networks, virtual-reality games and ceaselessly unfurling television programming, the faculty of hearing is greatly undervalued. And so we have ceased to appreciate the complexity of the voice, although it is a magically expressive instrument that addresses us with sensuous if volatile immediacy, appealing to our reserves of intuition; and although, or perhaps because, it is also a classical trope for the ambiguities of the quest for wisdom and perfection.
Read More
I start with a question driven by a recognition—that the notion of success or achievement or engagement or significance in the realm of public culture has been hijacked. These are currently conventionally measured by visitor numbers, outreach and inclusionary rhetorics, media chatter, market alliances, hyper signification, and celebrity and celebratory events. On occasion we find performances of engagement that index the major dramas of the day through forms of representation, easily recognized and equally easily shelved as having delivered a reflection upon our joint conditions and mutual imbrications.
Read More
Sara Ahmed: I have been asked to interview you about Gender Trouble and how this book has shaped the field of Queer Studies. In the preface to the second edition of Gender Trouble, you write that ‘the life of the text has exceeded my intentions, and this is surely in part because of the changing context of its reception’. I really like this description. I like the idea that texts have lives other than the ones we give them as writers, and that these lives are partly about how texts are ‘picked up’.
Read More
There are two very different meanings of ‘the public’ that one can roughly distinguish as public in the sense which in German is referred to as Öffentlichkeit, and public as audience, Publikum. Both are of interest for the kind of reflection that I want to develop in this lecture. As we will see later, they should be envisaged as the two sides of a process of discursive construction.
Read More
“The economic and political management of human populations through their exposure to death has become a global phenomenon. Wars, genocides, refugee “crisis”, ecocide and contemporary processes of pauperization and precarization reveal how increasing masses of individuals are now governed through their direct and indirect exposure to death. In order to unpack those processes, Achille Mbembe came up with the notion of necropolitics, first in 2003 with an essay bearing the same name, and then in 2016, with the book Politiques de l’inimitié, translated and published in English in 2019, as Necropolitics.
Read More
“Decolonial aestheSis departs from an embodied consciousness of the colonial wound and moves toward healing. ... And at the same time decolonial aestheSismoves towards the healing, the recognition, the dignity of those aesthetic practices that have been written out of the canon of modern aestheTics.”
Read More
B.R. Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste is one of the most important, yet neglected, works of political writing from India. Written in 1936, it is an audacious denunciation of Hinduism and its caste system. Ambedkar - a figure like W.E.B. Du Bois - offers a scholarly critique of Hindu scriptures, scriptures that sanction a rigidly hierarchical and iniquitous social system.
Read More
The rise of fascist, communist and totalitarian movements and the development of the two totalitarian regimes, Stalin's after 1929 and Hitler's after 1938, took place against a background of a more or less general, more or less dramatic breakdown of all traditional authorities. Nowhere was this breakdown the direct result of the regimes or movements themselves, but it seemed as though totalitarianism, in the form of regimes as well as of movements, was best fitted to take advantage of a general political and social atmosphere in which the validity of authority itself was radically doubted.
Read More
It was assumed that becoming a citizen, possessing and exercising rights, called for appropriate forms of education. Societies were understood to have both high and low forms of culture. Education provided the capacity for discernment - access to high culture - that the citizen needed. This could be self-education. It could be education through the right kind of experience. More commonly, however, it was thought that it fell to the educational institutions of modern societies to provide citizenly competence. Universities, museums, libraries, exhibitions and other comparable bodies assumed this task.
Read More
In recent years various dictatorships – of both internal and external origin – have collapsed or stumbled when confronted by defiant, mobilized people. Often seen as firmly entrenched and impregnable, some of these dictatorships proved unable to withstand the concerted political, economic, and social defiance of the people.
Read More